The Crazy True Story Of The Hollywood Blacklist

The Hollywood blacklist refers to a dark time period in not only in the entertainment industry but in United States history. In 1938, anti-Communist sentiment gave rise to a committee within the House of Representatives, the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC. The committee soon focused almost exclusively on investigating American citizens, usually employed within the Hollywood film industry, on the basis of their alleged or actual membership in, sympathy to, or association with the Communist Party or their refusal to cooperate with Congress' investigations. 

HUAC's secretive, fearmongering methods, encouragement of people to turn against one another in order to deflect persecution, abuse of its ability to subpoena citizens at will, and its tactic of implying that those who pleaded the Fifth Amendment during questioning did so because they were guilty of their supposed crimes amount to perhaps one of the only legitimate historical situations that could be accurately described as a metaphorical "witch hunt." In fact, Arthur Miller was inspired by his experiences with HUAC to write his play The Crucible, using the Salem witch trials as an allegory for both HUAC's investigations as well as those of Senator Joseph McCarthy. 

A 1941 review of The Trojan Horse in America in Foreign Affairs magazine called the book "further indication that Mr. Dies is rather more interested in promoting himself and his anti-New Deal and anti-"Communist" activities than in going after the Nazi and Fascist Fifth Columns, whether homegrown or imported." Indeed, Martin Dies was particularly focused on investigating aspects of Roosevelt's New Deal that he found troubling, including the Works Project Administration. The Federal Theatre Project, a division of the WPA, was headed by experimental theater scholar and producer Hallie Flanagan (pictured above). In 1938, HUAC member J. Parnell Thomas described the Federal Theatre Project as, according to Spartacus Educational, "infested by radicals from top to bottom." Other WPA employees described Flanagan as sympathetic to Communism and pointed to her interest in Russian theater and the project's productions of socially progressive plays as proof.

Flanagan described the hearings as reminiscent of "a badly staged courtroom scene" as opposed to "a congressional hearing on which the future of several thousand human beings depended." Thomas referred to her productions as "sheer propaganda for Communism or the New Deal," and Dies soon called for the resignation of several members of Roosevelt's administration because of their associations with "Socialists, Communists, and crackpots." Roosevelt didn't fire any of his associates, but he did end the Federal Theatre Project four years after it began, which one can assume bolstered and encouraged HUAC in its attempts to persecute creative professionals. 

As explained by Larry Ceplair in a 2008 Film History article, in 1940, Dies turned his attention to Hollywood. He called the film industry a "hotbed of Communism," compiled a long list of "subversives," and wrote two articles for Liberty magazine: "The Reds in Hollywood" and "Is Communism Invading the Movies?" Nevertheless, he received no support from studio heads at that point, and actors, writers, and directors remained united in their opposition to HUAC and their harassment. Despite this, Dies carried on and heard testimony from former Communist organizer John L. Leech, who named 43 people, including Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, as "members of, contributors to, or interested in the Communist party." Dies released the list of names and offered to "clear" those who agreed to testify, later doing so for all but one of those named. 

In 1941, Walt Disney took out an ad in Variety concerning a workers' strike at his studio. Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund quote it in their 1980 book The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960: "I am positively convinced that Communistic agitation, leadership, and activities has brought about this strike." Disney's mistreatment of those who worked for him reportedly led to the strike, but Disney's anti-Communist screeds were just beginning. He testified for HUAC and named as possible Communists employees who had been particularly active in his company's attempt to unionize. The committee eventually cleared all those he accused. 

According to Ceplair and Englund, the Hollywood Ten went to great lengths to gather support for their case as well as for freedom of speech, raising funds, embarking on speaking tours, and organizing an anti-censorship campaign. Their case eventually reached the Supreme Court after a series of appeals and was denied review, which meant that the Ten had no choice but to begin serving jail sentences of one year. One of those convicted, Edward Dmytryk (pictured), later publicly announced that he had been a Communist at one time and offered to give evidence against others, stating that "the people who had broken with the Party had to be helped, both because it was the right thing to do and because it hurt the Communist Party." He named 26 people to HUAC, and as a result, his sentence was shortened and his career rebounded. 

In his 1999 paper "How the Film and Televsion Blacklists Worked," Richard A. Schwartz described how the American Legion pressured studio heads to enlarge the blacklist. In 1951, they provided a list of 300 "subversives." Additionally, three former FBI agents who called themselves American Business Consultants, Inc. started a newsletter called Counterattack with the aim to "crush the Communist Fifth Column." Counterattack published a booklet in 1950 called Red Channels that listed 151 supposed Communist sympathizers and included "proof" of their Communist involvement. A listing in Red Channels made a person "controversial" and therefore ineligible for employment in Hollywood.

As described by Ceplair and Englund, as the investigations continued, more organizations in addition to Counterattack formed, feeding information to HUAC and employing "smear and clear" tactics in which they attacked political activists and then "offered their services" to cleanse the dirty accusations they themselves had brought, which required naming names of fellow members of the entertainment industry who could then be persecuted. These organizations included the Wage Earners Committee, who made their own lists of subversive people and media and led pickets of "dangerous" movies, and Aware, Inc., a group of New York actors who named and blamed supposed Communists via their publication Confidential Notebook.  

In addition to the official blacklist, which listed those called by HUAC who refused to cooperate and those who were identified as Communists during hearings, there was an unofficial "graylist" made up of some of the 60,000 people identified by HUAC within their over a million dossiers of information. Reasons for inclusion on the graylist ranged from confusing screenwriter Louis Pollock with another man named Louis Pollock who had refused to cooperate with HUAC to director Joseph Losey, who turned down the chance to direct a movie called I Married A Communist, which turned out to be a test used by RKO to identify supposed Communists. Some on the graylist found work in less reputable areas, such as composer Elmer Bernstein, who eked out a living scoring "sci-fi cheapies" such as Cat-Women of the Moon and Robot Monster.

The Hollywood blacklist began breaking in the mid- to late '50s. As Ceplair notes in his Film History article, producers never admitted that they were engaging in blacklisting, so there was no way to officially call an end to the practice. It happened gradually via one-off instances of studios and the public ignoring the so-called rules of the blacklist. 

In 1956, blacklisted director Jules Dassin, who had moved to Europe and continued his career there, released the movie Rififi, and it played in New York for 20 weeks without incident, save for a quote in the film's New York Times review: "Boy, what would they have done to this picture if it had been put up to Hollywood's Production Code!" Further cracks in the blacklist came from television producers, such as Alfred Hitchcock hiring blacklisted actor Norman Lloyd for Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Finally, in January 1960, Otto Preminger became the first in film to ignore blacklisting protocols when he announced that Dalton Trumbo was the screenwriter for his upcoming movie Exodus. Six months later, The New York Times announced he would be credited as the writer of the upcoming movie Spartacus, which he had been writing under a pseudonym. The Writers Guild of America went on to pursue correction of screen credits for blacklisted writers. Dalton Trumbo, who died in 1976, finally received the Oscar he'd earned for The Brave One in 1975, and in 1993, he received posthumous credit, including the Oscar for Best Screenwritng, for his work on Roman Holiday.